Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, known as the "female version of Jobs," was convicted of four counts of criminal fraud and faces up to 80 years in prison — though the actual sentence could be much less. Holmes's mistake was to ignore the reality of science and try to cover up the mistakes, becoming a negative teaching material for tech startups.
Holmes founded a company called Theranos in 2004. Theranos is a mixture of Therapy (treatment) and Diagnosis (diagnosis), and Holmes set his sights on nanotechnology to develop a machine that can detect and diagnose with just a few drops of blood on the fingertips.
Theranos' blood test technology was blown into a groundbreaking technique that year, and the company claimed that it could diagnose the disease with just a few drops of blood on the fingertips. Including AIDS, and even cancer.
However, with current technology, it is impossible to provide accurate detection data with only a few drops of blood on the fingertips. Two of these reasons: too few samples and fingertips are not the best place to draw blood. Blood test requires a certain amount of blood, and the content of the blood content is not evenly distributed throughout the body, the blood concentration of the fingertip is not high, and it is impossible to obtain accurate results by only counting drops of blood on the fingertip.
That would have been known to the scientists working at Theranos, and it was impossible for Holmes not to know. But she tried to disguise it, falsifying it in experiments and propaganda, and creating false data to win the trust of the public and investors. By 2014, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making it the brightest unicorn of the year. Holmes was named the world's youngest self-made billionaire woman by Forbes magazine in 2015.
But the paper eventually failed to catch fire, and Holmes's lies grew louder and louder, and internal employees, aware that the bomb would explode sooner or later, decided to reveal the company's inside story to the media. Holmes initially denied the allegations, but as more and more evidence came to light, the public finally realized that this was just a big lie. The company was dissolved in 2018 and Holmes was charged with multiple fraud charges.
In Holmes' defense, she said she never had the intention of lying or deliberately defrauding investors and patients involved in the experiment. She was also acquitted of all charges of defrauding patients, but was found guilty of four counts involving investor fraud.